Corporate networks and filing cabinets are often filled with sensitive data in the form of confidential emails, company-private documents, employee records, personally identifying information, tax forms, financial information, and more. This sensitive data may be spread across dozens or even hundreds of servers, personal computers, and/or hard copies. Ensuring that this data is kept secure may be very important for both a company's reputation and for its success. While companies may have data-loss-prevention (DLP) policies to ensure that sensitive data is handled correctly, with the myriad of ways to transmit data, from email to portable storage devices to faxes to file sharing, enforcing DLP policies has become more difficult than ever.
Traditional DLP systems typically examine outgoing hard-copy documents using optical character recognition techniques (OCR) to determine if their content is protected by a DLP policy. Unfortunately, OCR techniques are often both resource intensive and inaccurate. Accordingly, the instant disclosure identifies and addresses a need for additional and improved systems and methods for detecting attempts to transmit sensitive information via data-distribution channels.